Topical Guide 622
Mark Dorset
Wishful Thinking
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 26:
A fascinating thought arose in my mind, unexpected and unwilled but quite welcome: the dress on the ironing board might be the dress Ariane had been wearing at work. When she got home she had made herself a snack and come into the TV room. She had set up the ironing board, intending to iron her dress, which had horizontal wrinkles across the front because she’d been sitting at the Babbington Clam switchboard all day. She had turned the TV on and found that she was just in time to catch the beginning of the afternoon movie. She had taken the dress off and tossed it onto the ironing board with the intention of ironing it while she watched the movie, but she had settled onto the sofa to eat her snack and gotten interested in the movie and hadn’t bothered ironing the dress. It was a pleasant theory, because if it was correct it meant that Ariane was just a sofa’s length away from me, alone in a darkened room, in her slip. To test the theory, all I would have had to do was take a peek, but I didn’t want to, because I knew that if I did there was a strong likelihood that the assumptions and deductions from which the attractive theory was constructed would turn out to have been nothing more than wishful thinking and would collapse in a heap, like a doghouse suffering from cumulative error or a lighthouse built by kids.
Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy”:
As I recall, on most of my visits Ariane would be prowling around the house in a slip, rubbing against door jambs or running her hands over her hips and purring. In hot weather, she wore tiny cotton underpants and a sleeveless undershirt. It was that outfit that she was wearing now, while she cleaned the spilled chowder from the floor.
At Home with the Glynns:
My art is made of recollection, and revision, and wishful thinking.
See also:
Wishful Thinking TG 43; TG 91; TG 547
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